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The Care and Feeding of Warriors: What's next?
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host. I talked about BlizzCon's revelations last week - this week, I'm thinking about what they mean. I've only tanked LFR and a couple of flex runs in patch 5.4, because I'm full-time DPS at the end of an expansion for the first time ever - I didn't manage this at the end of Burning Crusade or Wrath or Cataclysm (and frankly, prot was so good at the end of Cataclysm that I wasn't even all that upset about switching back to it) but the overall weakness of prot warriors in previous patches and the strength of other classes (and their players) means that for once, the tanks are rock solid and I don't have to worry. So I don't. Still, I keep my hand in with LFR groups (specifically late night ones) and am ready to step into flex when I am needed, and so far, I'd say that protection feels solid. It can burst fairly high, although it's still nowhere near the top of tanking DPS, and our new 2 piece tank set bonus is very solid. Overall I'm impressed with how much better it is than it was in 5.2/5.3.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: All we know so far from BlizzCon
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host. Let's go over some things we learned this weekend that will have an effect on us as warriors (as always, keep in mind this is all subject to change): We learned that there will be new level 100 talents (which we'll go over) Hit and expertise are gone, baby. In their place are will be new stats like movement speed and Cleave, which will act like the Siege of Orgrimmar trinkets we've seen that allow either damage or healing to chain to other nearby targets. Also gone? Dodge and parry as stats on gear. We will still be dodging and parrying, but not via gear itemization. Also also gone? Reforging. A lot of gear changes, in total. There will also be changes to armor itemization to make it easier to share gear between classes and specs. Plate will switch primary stat based on your spec, so all plate with be strength plate unless you're a holy pally (which you aren't) whereupon it will switch to int plate. Plate is plate now. You will be able to choose one character and boost it to level 90, be it a new fresh level 1 you roll as soon as you get Warlords of Draenor or an old alt you left by the wayside. Did you stop playing in Wrath? Your level 80 can skip those 10 levels. Since we know a lot of people have rerolled other classes, this could be useful to get some warriors back in the saddle. I don't pretend that this is all we'll end up finding out, but it's enough to start talking about.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: If you pull threat, it's your fault
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host. This is not open for debate. If you pull threat, it's your fault. Always. If you massively overgear the tank and he can't possibly hope to hold if you go full out, choosing to go full out may be fun as hell, but it's still a choice you made. It's still your fault. Blowing all your cooldowns and hitting Bladestorm before the adds have even reached the tanks on Garrosh Hellscream? Your fault. Going cleave happy on Paragons even though there's absolutely no reason to do so other than raw meter padding? Your fault. Yes, I know tank threat and tank DPS is higher than ever, and a really good tank will often quickly become untouchable due to Vengeance. That's great - it's also irrelevant. If you pull threat, it is your fault. The issue is simple - your damage done is always more important than your DPS. If you go splat on trash, whatever, it's a lark - my own raid makes a game out of when I'll die on trash. DPS warriors explode on trash all the time - you get overly excited, you forget to watch where you're standing and take a couple cleaves to the face, game over. That's life in the melee trenches. But on a boss fight, it's your responsibility to live as long as possible. You have to live, because your DPS is irrelevant if you're only alive for five seconds. Sure, maybe you do an awesome 500k DPS in that five seconds. If you're dead afterwards, that 500k DPS comes out to a paltry two and a half million damage, and if you'd stayed alive over the course of the fight you might have been able to contribute much, much more damage than that. Sure, you'd have dropped to less than half that big burst in terms of damage per second, but you'd have gotten a lot more seconds to damage in. And worst of all, we have tools for exactly this situation now.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: The Burst Window
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host. Still working on that prot in 5.4 post, as well as a post about how best to use SimCraft (and how not to use it) - so of course this week we talk about DPS again. One of the things I see on twitter and in email is a general sense of confusion about how to DPS as a warrior. It can be somewhat anti-intuitive, especially if you played a warrior in previous expansions and you're trying to adapt to the new scheme. As someone who was prot for the end of Cataclysm and the first few months of Mists one of the concepts that I really had to re-learn and get very comfortable with was that of the burst window. Strictly put, fury warrior DPS is predicated on the idea of a period of about six seconds following every Colossus Smash. After CS, you bypass 100% of your targets armor for six seconds, which means that this is the best time for you to put as much damage on your target as possible. Because Heroic Strike is off the GCD, it can be used at the same time as other attacks such as Raging Blow, which means that during the Colossus Smash window you can fit about three Heroic Strokes (with its 1.5 second cooldown) and two Raging Blows within that window. You can usually also fit a Bloodthirst within that period as well. This burst window - the six second duration of the 100% armor reduction following a Colossus Smash - results in a sort of punctuated equilibrium for fury warrior DPS. What do I mean by that? Well, I'll elaborate.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: AoE vs. Single Target
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host. I've done some tanking in flex, and I even decided to tank in LFR after doing a fun Sha of Pride kill as arms, which turned out to be less fun due mostly to my own impatience (and a fair degree of rust on my tanking skills). Still, I felt like prot was working fairly well - it still lacks the old Cataclysm feeling of mobility, but damage is up and the two piece protection set bonus is nice. What really happened while I was tanking, though, was that I started to think about all the AoE we hurl around as warriors. Both protection and arms are tossing Deep Wounds around like candy - Deep Wounds is so much of my AoE DPS it can get ridiculous on certain fights. I can put out enough damage on the opening pull of General Nazgrim that I can basically coast for the rest of the fight and still place in the top five. As a tank, I have yet to be able to convince myself not to take Shockwave - being able to hit a cone of mobs in front of me every 20 seconds is just so convenient. I find myself wondering if the past year of World of Warcraft has just conditioned me to think of the class as an AoE class.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Proc Weapons, How I Miss Thee
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host. Remember Gurthalak? Remember how it single-handedly propped up arms warriors at the end of Cataclysm? The proc on the weapon was really excellent, almost any melee who could use a 2h weapon wanted one. Admittedly, Gurth didn't invent proc weapons. Icecrown Citadel had some excellent weapon procs, Last Word, for instance, had an excellent proc primarily because it was almost always up - a proc that thematically owed a lot to the first real dedicated tanking epic warriors in Classic WoW would have wanted to get, Quel'Serrar. Quel's defense proc (back when defense was a thing) made it very desirable as a tanking weapon, second only to Thunderfury - and the legendary was so amazing because of its proc. It was essentially a super-Thunder Clap, great for aggro and for debuffing attack speed on targets, reducing damage taken by the tank using it. Proc weapons have a long and stories history in World of Warcraft. One of the first weapons I crafted at level 60 was an Arcanite Champion, a weapon based entirely around its strength and heal proc. It replaced the Blackhand Doomsaw, another proc based weapon. As time has progressed, we've moved away from these weapons - stat based weapons have dominated, and for the most part that's for the best, as it's easier to balance stats. If one looks at the evolution of proc weapons, even in Burning Crusade those weapons that had procs still tended to have stats on them. One of my favorite things about Dragon Soul was the proc weapons on Deathwing - they seemed special, designed less around playing statistical Tetris through reforging and more around visual flair as well as interesting damage output.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Tier 16 Set Bonuses
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host. So last week I got my four piece DPS set bonus. And I now deeply resent said set bonus, because it is effectively useless. In a ten minute dummy parse, it procced three times. That's right, I got to hit execute three times in ten minutes. Subsequent use in actual raiding has proved no more exciting. On average I get one to two executes per boss fight out of it. Perhaps one free execute during execute phase. It is, simply put, terrible. I had heard that the Death Sentence buff was underwhelming, but saying that it is underwhelming is completely underselling how little it matters. Even for arms, which can almost always delay that Death Sentence execute until a Colossus Smash, it's just underwhelming. For fury, you'd almost not bother -- with the 20% buff to Bloodthirst and Raging Blow, just use those. So my advice to you is, if you're a DPS warrior, get the helmet and legs, maybe even the gloves - they're all solidly itemized. Then get offset shoulders and a chestplate, especially since the tier BP is a haste/mastery BP. The two piece set bonus is good for fury and great for arms. But this is the first time in a while where I'd actually advocate not bothering with a four piece, and this is after I'd deliberately bid on and won the fourth piece myself thinking "It must be better than I'm hearing it is". It's not better than that. It's significantly worse. Don't waste your time.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: The Plunder from the Siege Part 2
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host. Seven bosses down, six to go. Let's talk about the loot we're going to, well, loot from the Siege of Orgrimmar. As an aside, this is the most I've ever felt like I was actually looting a place. Malkorok Winner of the prestigious "Name that I keep sticking extra A's in for no reason" award, and this raid's Hulk impersonator. What does the big M drop? Besides pain. He drops some pain. But also loot. Let's look at it, shall we? Malkorok's Skullcleaver - solid for either tanking or SMF fury, with hit and critical strike rating and a red socket. It also appears to have a set of tauren horns mounted on the side of it, which is somewhat disturbing. Vial of Living Corruption - tanking trinket, the stam on it is useful (stam is still a solid tanking option, even if it lacks the appeal of hit or mastery or an avoidance stat) but the cooldown reduction is the real draw here. It actually works on both Last Stand and Shield Wall for protection as well as Recklessness, meaning you can get more crit and thus put out more damage/threat (as well as guaranteeing a Shield Slam critical hit to Enrage you). Malkorok's Giant Stompers - tank/DPS boots with expertise, mastery, a blue socket and a crit bonus on that socket. I'd definitely use them for tanking over DPS unless expertise is a significant problem for you, there's better DPS options for boots in the raid as a whole. Malkorok's Tainted Dog Tags - See, this is why it feels like we're really actually looting a place - we're practically rummaging through Malkorok's entire kit of worldly possessions. This necklace is a very solid melee DPS neck for warriors, with critical strike and mastery. Legplates of Willful Doom - On the one hand, very nicely itemized DPS legs with crit, mastery and three sockets. On the other hand, with legs and gloves dropping not just in this raid but from the Celestials on the Timeless Isle (not the Timless Isle, although I have not seen Tim out there yet) it's likely you'll have your 2 piece by the time you fight Malkorok, and thus, these legs won't be of much use to you. Blood Rage Bracers - Parry/Expertise tank bracers, solidly itemized. Good for a warrior tank.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Arms, the destroyer
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host. Okay, this will be a bit of a departure for me. So far, I'm half-way through Siege of Orgrimmar, and the following has happened: I've switched to raiding as arms. I've enjoyed myself. I've done solid to very solid damage, especially on any fight with an AoE component. So for the Fallen Protectors, Sha of Pride, Galakras and Kor'kron Dark Shaman, fights where you can at the least cleave if not outright AoE, DPS as arms is good. Okay, on Galakras it's very good. So very good. I love Galakras, is what I'm saying. I miss fury for the coolness factor of carrying around two weapons, but I've been SMF the last month or so anyway, and frankly I find SMF personally unsatisfying. If you like it, I'm glad, and I'm very glad it's been good for the past couple of patches, but man I just don't feel right DPS with 1h weapons. So for me, if I can't be TG, I'm happier arms anyway. Arms is very raid viable right now. It's awesome AoE, but it's solid to very solid for single target. Slam (especially with the Colossus Smash debuff) and the buff to Mortal Strike make our single target rotation hit a lot harder than it did. You will never touch HS. You'll barely ever hit Cleave, although you absolutely will be cleaving. You'll just do it with Sweeping Strikes and Slam. Slam is, finally, a good and fun button to hit. This is the DPS spec we've been waiting for - one that works, that does good raid damage, that requires you to actually be awake and pay some attention but which isn't absolutely crippled by missing a button push. Arms is fun right now. So let's talk more about arms in 5.4 and how surprisingly good it is without being an overpowered monster.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Why you should tank in 5.4
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host. Sometimes, you just want to write a simple column with an easy to answer premise. The idea for today's column came when I was tanking LFR early this morning, something I do to keep my hand in tanking now that I'm a DPS warrior. We had an extremely hairy moment on Lei Shen when the other tank mis-timed the hammer throw and got gibbed and I had to move Lei Shen to the other pillar very quickly. So I intervened out to a caster, then heroic leaped to the next pillar while hoping someone would battle res the other tank (they did). We got Lei Shen down, which was nice, but it got me thinking about tanking for warriors in 5.4. There are quite a few adjustments for protection in 5.4, which we covered last week. So this week I asked myself a simple question: should warriors who have given up tanking, or who have never tanked, give tanking a shot in 5.4? And the answer is yes, they should. Now, we could just say "Great, glad to have that answered" and go about our days, but then we'd be stuck with the smallest column ever, and those of you who've gotten used to me are probably aware that I don't do small columns. Besides, I have multiple reasons why you should give tanking a chance if you are a warrior.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Summing up Patch 5.4
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host. So we're about 11 days away from patch 5.4 as I type these words. Looks to me like it's time to round up what we'll be getting and what we won't be getting. These are the notes (they're updated to August 27th) and so it is safe to say that there will be no further damage balancing. They are as we can expect them to go live. I will go on record now in these opening paragraphs and say that they are not sufficient, either for DPS or tanking. Warriors will see insufficient improvement. Fury will see no improvement. Arms will see some AoE DPS improvement, as will protection, but it won't be enough. Prot warriors will have even less reason to take Bladestorm than they already do, but since Bladestorm is hardly popular among prot as is, I don't expect that to really matter. The changes to Vengeance won't really hurt us as much as other tanks, since our DPS was already the last by a large margin anyway. The buff to Deep Wounds and the various other buffs to arms AoE means that, come 5.4, arms may just be the best raid spec (at least initially) overall. But it will still be middle of the road at best. But all the trepidation in the world won't change the fact that we're not getting the buffs we need to remain competitive, or become so in the case of protection warriors. So instead, let's look at what we are getting. What are the class changes we can expect?
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Take what drops?
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host. In looking over the changes to warriors in patch 5.4, we know that the patch will be going live on September 10th and, as of now, we've seen very little in way of buffs to our DPS (fury is seeing a change to Storm Bolt that might make it worth taking, arms is getting some AoE dps buffs and all warriors should see a slight bump from Deep Wounds, but nothing terribly significant) - I think it's safe to say we're not going to see anything like a buff to our main attacks at this point. Combined with some set bonuses that will favor arms over fury (the two piece, anyway) and I admit that I'm considering going arms once 5.4 rolls around. This is deeply ironic considering I just got a heroic thunderforged 1h weapon for my SMF set. I took the scimitar for three reasons I think most warrior players will appreciate. It was a huge improvement over my normal 2h raid weapons. It dropped and I could use it. See number two. While SMF puts out more DPS than either TG or arms as of right now (it's debatable whether or not that will continue) the two fury specs are close enough that as of right now, DPS warriors are in a strange position of being able to essentially switch between the two. It's not as easy as simply slapping on the weapons, of course - the current game is one with reforging and gem selection to consider. In order to go from TG to SMF, I have to reforge several pieces of gear as well as change my gem selection (and it is of course even harder to go arms from either TG or SMF). This is somewhat counter to the idea that you would use either TG or SMF based on whatever drops - even if you find yourself suddenly holding a much better SMF set, you can't ignore the work you'll need to get SMF ready, and you certainly can't switch between the two on a fight per fight basis.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: All is not lost
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host. So, that last week was depressing, huh? Kind of hard to come back from that one. I stand by it, bolstered in part by the return of Cynwise with the numbers data. There is definitely some rot in the warrior class, and people are moving on to alternatives that provide more DPS or tanking viability. And this needs to change. But, as I said in the title, all is not lost. We know that patch 5.4 has started its numbers balancing phase (admittedly with two weeks to go, it's gonna be a fast numbers phase) and already we've seen a significant buff to Deep Wounds and Slam. Are they enough? No, but overall the changes warriors are seeing are positive ones, even if they're too conservative. Several commenters on the previous post mentioned that end game, especially high end raiding end game, isn't the be all and end all of the game. I agree, but since warriors are very weak before they do things like get hit and expertise to 7.5% (as DPS) or get solid tanking gear with high hit and expertise (as tanks) and both fury and arms suffer from massive critical strike dependence, in a way that's even worse for us. Warriors are weak at lower levels of gear, weak when not at max level, weak when not fully capped, and then when we get geared we're still weaker than others. So the fixes needed should be fixes across the board, not band aids. However, there's still quite a few good things to be said about the warrior class. For starters, we're warriors. You can pick up a member of any race and they can be a warrior. The rage system has had its ups and downs but it's conceptually easier to understand than the mess of combo points, runes, holy power, maelstrom stacks and other weird resource mechanics out there - you get mad, you smash. Simple and elegant. But really, the fact is simple. I love warriors. Still. Years in. And I want to talk about why.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: The Exodus
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host. There are columns I don't like to write. This is one of them. When multiple players from all levels of raiding tell you that they've dropped the warrior class for better alternatives, there's a problem. When people who have played a warrior for six years (and who therefore have survived from BC through Wrath and Cataclysm to the present day) tell you they had to switch to keep from hindering their raids, there's a serious problem. It's not just tanking, it's not just DPS, and it's not just PvP - it's all of them. When the expansion opened, arms warriors were at a ridiculously high 14% of high end PvP - now that number has dwindled to around 5%, and that's around a 2% drop in two months. Meanwhile, prot warrior numbers in raiding have only fallen slightly, but that doesn't change the fact that other tanks like Death Knights, Paladins and Guardian Druids are all going up in numbers - even Brewmaster Monks are up to 2.2% of the raid population. Another way to put it is like this - protection warriors are 2.5% of total representation in raiding, but overall are 3.5% of the game population. Both Guardian Druids and Brewmaster Monks see more representation in raids than in the game at large - prot paladins are almost twice as common in raids as they are in the game. Death Knights are an interesting outlier, in that they make up 3.7% of raiding, but 4% of the total DK population - clearly DK's are still very popular tanks, but even they lag behind the prot paladin juggernauts. We've talked about fury warrior DPS and the complete lack of arms warriors in raiding - to some degree, arms will probably see a bit of a bump when 5.4 comes out and significantly buffs their AoE DPS. Since the PTR hasn't done damage balancing yet, harping on fury or arms DPS issues seems disingenuous. We'll wait for that balancing. Let's talk about where warriors are going, instead.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: How we change
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host. Okay, I was all set to write a mildly disappointed post about patch 5.4 and what it hasn't changed for warriors. And then Blizzard went and did this. So here I am, feeling multiple things. I'm not good at feeling multiple things. Here's what's going through my head: When I was first told about this, I was in a raid. I frankly did not believe it. It's still somewhat hard to believe, actually. Holy snap, I did not expect this ever. Haste? I mean, really? If these are Ordos drops (as I suspect they might be) then I guess I'm gonna have to go kill Ordos a few times. I mean, I have to get a pair of those, right? Seriously, haste and mastery? Hit/mastery would have been the best spread if you wanted them to be useful for both tanking and DPS (which two blue sockets makes me think) and if you wanted dedicated DPS shoulders, then crit/mastery or crit/haste would have been better. Man, I really got an item named after me. That is so cool I don't even know. Wait, haste and mastery on an item named after me? Is this Blizzard trolling me? Am I being trolled by the biggest MMO in the world? I'm a little afraid that writing something critical of WoW's upcoming patch 5.4 direction will seem a trifle ungrateful after this news. But let's face it, everyone knew what I was yesterday, and everyone knows who I am today. Warriors could be the number one DPS and best tanks by miles and I wouldn't really be satisfied. Still, it must be said that this is an awesome thing and I'm very very grateful to see my name on an item in WoW. Now then, we were scheduled to talk about how patch 5.4 is shaping up in terms of warriors and class changes.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: A Single-Minded Fury
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host. For most of 2012 and 2013 I was simply unable to test SMF out myself. It was simming to be the best DPS spec for warriors as early as normal Mogu'shan Vaults. but like all warrior specs it's ludicrously gear dependent and arms was simply easier for me to gear up - you can completely hit cap arms, it's not so shackled to crit as the only worthwhile DPS stat, and most importantly I had a two handed weapons. One handers were a myth told to me in a dream by ghostly apparitions, not items I actually saw drop. Even my tanking weapon was in fact an agi weapon that would have gotten disenchanted if I hadn't picked it up. Then I found myself in a situation with three other DPS warriors, and again getting 1h DPS weapons seemed absolutely impossible because I was constantly competing with two other players for them. But the funny thing is, eventually everyone else gets geared up, and then? Then the drops are yours to rescue from the disenchant pile. When a thunderforged Qon's Flaming Scimitar dropped and no one wanted it (saving their points for heroic drops, no doubt) I decided I'd snap that up and go SMF for a week. What did I learn?
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: What Celestial Blessings tells us about warriors
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host. First, you should read this - it gives you a solid overview of what the Celestial Blessings fights require from a tank or melee DPS. Now that you've read that, I figure I'll spend this column taking the lessons of my day spent doing Celestial Blessings (about two hours of attempts all told before I finally got the cape) explaining what the quest taught me. I did both the melee DPS and tank options several times, ultimately settling on the tanking quest after four 5% wipes on Wrathion on the melee DPS challenge. I'm of two minds about these quests. On the one hand, I'm really happy I got through them - I feel like it was a worthy achievement and forced me to use a lot of my toolkit. Getting Wrathion reliably to 5% feels like a moral victory, especially because the four times he killed me I was killed by being inside his cone despite the graphic showing that I was outside of it - that feels like cheating, you dragon jerk. Doing the tanking challenge definitely is easier than the melee DPS one, purely because it's easier to control the tanking challenge. Sure, Wrathion will do his level best to take damage and die, but almost all of it is something you can work to prevent.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Look at all these trees
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host. There's an old saying about not seeing the forest for the trees. It can be applied to World of Warcraft - sometimes you can't see the problem with your class because you're operating in a vacuum composed of yourself and your raid group and you have no way of knowing how others are doing. I let this happen to myself over the course of Throne of Thunder and now I'm forced to realize things aren't fine after all. The problem is fairly simple - warrior DPS has not kept up. Warrior DPS falls as more mobility and/or target switching become required on fights. While it's hardly conclusive of anything, take a look at this listing of DPS rankings from Noxxic. If you remember the same rankings back when patch 5.2 first came out, you'll remember that fury was a lot higher up on it, not ranked around number 19/20. Arms is an even more depressing number 23. What happened to our DPS? Well, for starters, all the fights did. There's always a difference between optimal DPS (that is, you can stand there, hit all your buttons properly, and put out your best) and realistic DPS. If you look at Noxxic's maximum DPS for 522 gear, you'll see a pretty substantial improvement, popping fury back up to number 11 or so. Again, this isn't conclusive, it just points to a trend. If you want more evidence of that trend, take a look at the World of Logs DPS rankings for Throne of Thunder. On Normal, looking at all regions, warriors only manage to make the top 10 on Tortos. On heroic, they don't even manage that. Even heroic Tortos, a fight warriors excel on in normal mode, becomes grueling on heroic.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Fourth Spec Blues
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host. So yeah, I just plain forgot they'd nerfed Sweeping Strikes down to 50% a while ago. I haven't played arms since I got my second 2h weapon in ToT, so it just plain slipped my mind. Sorry, everyone. This of course means that arms is just plain getting an AoE buff, and I still maintain that single target DPS is where both arms and fury fall behind other classes. Right now the only class that can reliably beat me on AoE fights is warlocks. I don't know if warlocks have an incredible means to spread AoE damage or I'm just running into the best warlocks in existence. So I find this emphasis on AoE for arms a little baffling. I'm not necessarily complaining about it, just confused by it. It's also fairly clear that as of right now the PTR has no significant changes for fury outside of TG polearms. So we're basically in a situation where prot is getting DPS buffs, arms is getting AoE buffs, and fury gets to look like a helicopter. Since there are no egregious nerfs on the horizon, Shield Wall and Spell Reflection are shaping up to work on live without shields (Horde players currently pull an old Horde PvP shield out, Alliance the Ally shield) we're clear to discuss something I've been thinking about for a while, namely whether warriors should have a fourth spec and if so what should it do?
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: The deaths of the multitude
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host. The changes to arms in patch 5.4 are good if viewed from the lens that the fury warrior DPS model is one that arms should be emulating - namely, more AoE than burst or single target. Quite frankly, when discussing warrior DPS, I think the emphasis on our damage isn't where it should be. Fury does good to very good AoE damage, especially with the right talents, but our single target burst and sustained damage lags far behind other classes. Fury simple doesn't hit as hard, especially not on fights where rage gets interrupted for any reason, and arms adopting the same shotgun blast AoE damage model has problems. Yes, it will bring arms up on the charts. But it could also cement warriors as the trash DPS - bring them to clear to the boss or kill a lot of adds, but if you need someone to put sustained high damage on a single target, you may want to switch them out. This isn't to say that fury is terrible at single-target. It isn't. It's simply a concern of mine that fury, which underperforms compared to other melee in that regard, should perhaps not be the model for how arms is designed. If the two specs are functionally both concerned with AoE DPS, they come dangerously close to feeling homogenized. But for now, we have to deal with the spec we have, not the spec we might think we would rather have. So what will be happening with arms in patch 5.4?
